One Legacies season 4 episode saw The Originals spinoff series spoof one of The Vampire Diaries’ biggest competitors, the Twilight saga. Debuting in 2018, Legacies is the second spinoff from ‘00s teen phenomenon The Vampire Diaries. At the time of its release, The Vampire Diaries earned many comparisons to the Twilight franchise, which makes Legacies’ playful parody of Twilight’s final film an interesting choice.
Since the spinoff debuted, Legacies has been lighter in tone than The Vampire Diaries and The Originals. Unlike its two parent shows, Legacies has a campy sense of humor that made the students of the Salvatore School for the Young and Gifted’s supernatural misadventures a lot more light-hearted than those earlier shows. However, that has all changed in Legacies season 4, a darker and bloodier iteration of the show that skews closer to the typical tone of The Vampire Diaries universe.
For example, the opening scene of ‘You’re a Long Way from Home,’ (season 4 episode 6) saw Legacies heroine Hope brutally kill all of her former friends, the rest of Legacies’ heroes, decapitating one character and staking another two. Unlike Hope’s earlier, very real attack on The Originals/The Vampire Diaries star Alaric, the scene was revealed to all be a simulation that her friends were running to see whether they could curtail Hope’s bloody rampage as a nigh-on unstoppable Tribrid. It was still a brutal shock to viewers, though, and one that parodied the infamous ending fake-out from Twilight’s final movie adaptation, Breaking Dawn. In Breaking Dawn, the revelation that none of the series-shaking deaths actually happened was seen as a cop-out by many critics, whereas Legacies used the gambit to pull off a playful cold open instead of putting the rug pull at the end of a five-movie blockbuster series.
Unlike the often tragic The Vampire Diaries,Twilight did not kill off many characters in its five-movie run and rarely sacrificed anyone of importance to the story. Legacies is not as bad at killing off important central figures as Twilight, but Landon’s many Legacies deaths prove that The Originals spinoff does tend to kill off characters and swiftly bring them back. After both Landon and Alaric were (seemingly) killed off for good, this season 4 outing was a perfect chance for Legacies to spoof the more gore-averse vampire franchise by pretending to off most of its cast in one fell swoop and then revealing it was all just pretend.
Whether Legacies does end up undoing the death of Landon remains to be seen, but the retcon is one likely to split the fanbase. While many Vampire Diaries fans are glad to see the spinoff embrace the darker elements of its predecessor, some have noted that Hope’s Tribrid transformation is essentially revisiting Elena’s vampiric arc on the earlier show. For those fans, the return of Landon may be a welcome respite from the dark, derivative plot, but regardless of how the series goes in the future, Legacies has proven that, like The Vampire Diaries, The Originals spinoff can’t be accused of being as bloodless as Twilight.
